Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio. He was the seventh and youngest child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. In 1854, the family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Edison had little formal schooling and was largely educated at home by his mother. He was partially deaf from an early age, a condition he attributed to various causes; the precise origin is uncertain.

As a teenager, Edison worked as a telegraph operator, a job that gave him practical experience with electrical systems. He moved between several cities working as a telegrapher before setting himself up as an independent inventor in the late 1860s. In 1869 he moved to New York City and developed several improvements to telegraph technology that he sold to Western Union, providing him with initial capital.

In 1876, Edison established a research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, which became one of the first institutions organized specifically to produce inventions systematically. In 1877 he developed the phonograph, a device capable of recording and reproducing sound, which attracted wide public attention. In 1879, following extensive experimentation, he demonstrated a practical incandescent electric light bulb with a long-burning carbon filament. Subsequent work at Menlo Park and a later, larger facility in West Orange, New Jersey, included the development of an electrical power distribution system for urban areas, improvements to the telephone transmitter, the kinetoscope (an early motion picture viewing device), and storage batteries, among many other projects.

Edison organized several companies to commercialize his inventions, including Edison Electric Light Company and companies that eventually became part of General Electric. He was involved in a well-documented commercial and technical dispute with George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla over whether direct current or alternating current systems were preferable for electrical power distribution.

By the time of his death on 18 October 1931 in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison held 1,093 United States patents, a record that stood for many decades. He was eighty-four years old.